Entries tagged with wtf

2. Graahhhr. After all that, I forgot to nominate Vampire Academy for festivids. Well, I guess the fact that no one else did either means there wouldn't have been a request for it anyway.

3. Just returned from Atul Gawande book reading. ♥ Was not super impressed by The Checklist -- could have been an essay rather than a book -- but so far this new one seems important, difficult, clear, moving, illuminating, conversation-starting. *Eddie Izzard voice* Any many other adjectives as well.

4. It's almost the weekend. So looking forward to sleeeep. And more than likely some autumnal domesticity/nesting.

You guys, sabinelagrande has created a podfic of my SGA story Upside Down and Inside Out, in which John, whose body has temporarily been turned into that of a woman for unexplained reasons, gets tied up and hung from the ceiling and brought off in three marvelous ways by Rodney (who is not temporarily in a female body) at the behest of off-screen aliens.

It is a marvelous podfic, read quickly and expressively and with audible enjoyment. Granted, that is a biased review on my part because this is the first time a story of mine has been podficced and I am beside myself with delight to hear the scene brought to life like this. Nonetheless! It is a joy to listen to, it sounds clever and peppy and tight, and the occasional infusions of Southern vowels are charming, as are the parts where Sabine-as-Sheppard tries to speak around the rope in her-his mouth. Even if the whole experience is a bit unreal since all podfics have to date been readings of stories by people who are not me. It is also fitting that Sabine chose to read this particular story for her "suspension" Bingo square, as the fic was written to fulfill a kink-saturated prompt of hers a couple years back.

On the subject of cars and car shopping, I can only say this: Why on Earth do all these new models have such narrow windows and ill-placed rear-view mirrors and headrests? Is it so much to ask that a car be something you can see out of? No wonder so many people go for backup-view cameras and blind-spot sensors. This is like when I tried to get a watch in December and found that four analog models out of five lacked hour marks. Why would you want a watch that does not tell you what time it is. I am not looking for jewelry masquerading as a timepiece. I am not looking for a sporty body masquerading as a safe-to-operate vehicle. Ugh. What next, flatscreen TVs that don't actually hook up to provider services?

Wow. It's not bad enough that media producers call on their viewerships for free creative labor -- now journalists can poll their readers for story ideasin the publication in which they plan to run the story and state outright that the person with the good idea will receive nothing for it but the satisfaction of seeing the result in print? (And this particular example is not one of the new-media journalism concepts where people donate nominal amounts of money so journalists unaffiliated with corporate-sponsored publications can cover a particular aspect of the news, which is an interesting model.) Screw that. Coming up with a fresh story idea is hard, and it's not fair to ask your readers to do the scut work for you.

This is a crowdsourcing dream for the people doing the sourcing, but as a sometime member of the crowd, I am not happy.

People are battening down the hatches here, waiting for the storm they're saying will dump a foot and a half of snow by tomorrow evening. It'll be our third storm in a week. I am loving this winter, and not just because I get to telework so much. Wednesday morning dawned with an otherworldly landscape: branches coated with wet snow, lit yellow-white against the blue-gray clouds, a pale disc of sun visible behind them.

As the first flurries are falling, here are three things that cracked me up yesterday:

1. An email confirming that I got a spot on the White House tour (yay!) instructed me as follows: "Please be in line at 12:45 p.m. and don't forget your id." I'm surprised they encourage such wanton behavior, since things like purses, pens, "personal grooming items," stun guns and martial arts weapons are forbidden. I'd wondered if I could even bring my apartment keys, but apparently they do allow those in.

2. This indescribable political ad, found via this Slate article. Skip the middle if you want, but be sure to tune back in for ~2:20. Just. *hand flail* The pedestal and the drama and the demon sheep. It is brilliant in its self-aware cheesiness. The fact that most of it is narrated by Robert Davi just makes it all the more awesome. KOLYA DOES NOT APPROVE OF HYPOCRITICAL FISCAL CONSERVATIVES.

3. Eric calling children "teacup humans" on True Blood. (Here is the scene - gets best after 1:10. The kid's delivery of the Jesus line is equally fantastic. Warning for a Sam-related spoiler from season one, a spoiler about the villain in season two, and a season two spoiler in the title of another clip that shows up in the sidebar and in the main window when the video finishes. You can avoid the first two if you skip to 1:10.) I love him so much, and am so glad he got more screen time.

Happy Halloween! I kept forgetting it was Halloween, but then another prisoner or pirate or Furby or pair of chickens would walk by, and it would all come back to me. Plus, the burrito place was giving out free candy.

Mostly, though, it felt like a regular Friday and a beautiful sunny fall day. My friend and I snapped some pictures between classes.

This past Saturday, ignazwisdom and I witnessed an annual MIT tradition known as the Pumpkin Drop, wherein a series of large pumpkins were tossed from the top of the Earth and Planetary Sciences building, which happens to be, if their claim is true, the tallest building in Cambridge. They boomed and exploded satisfyingly when they hit the ground. The organizers played things like the 1812 Overture while it all took place, too, over the noise of the crowd and the unfortunate wind and rain. Here are a few video clips:

To celebrate the completion of another week, most of my classmates and I just went out for tasty pizza. Now I'm going to try to finish up an old WIP before bed, since I've given up on getting work done tonight.

Here is today's, a book description I found on a website that catalogues vampires in literature:

William Pridgen. NIGHT OF THE DRAGON'S BLOOD (Palatka, FL: Hodge & Braddock, 1997). Comic novel. What if Hitler were a vampire hiding out in South America -- who had made Eva Peron a vampire, too?

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My co-worker lent me a tape of The L-Word because one of the characters is dating someone she's convinced is a vampire. The woman's name is Uta Refson (spell it backwards) and she claims to be a vampirologist. It was pretty funny. Alan Cumming was also in it, first in a Victor/Victoria sort of getup and then in regular mascara etc.

Thus we got to talking about Alan Cumming just now, and I asked if she knew about his cologne line. "Yeah," she said, "Isn't it called 'Cumming All Over Your Face' or something?" At which point I burst out laughing, and then she burst out laughing, and then we had a little too much fun here and here. She's decided to put "Cumming In A Bar" on her Secret Santa list next year. In the meantime, maybe we'll go see The Threepenny Opera.

Life continues. Am in love with my new GP (we talked X-Files and fanfic and why I'm not in medical school, he's lovely to look at, and naturally he is married with a newborn). Still equate my mother's choice of hangouts/company with torture. Weekend approaching.

Under the advisement of a committee of theologians, the Pope is considering abolishing the concept of limbo. (Full story.)

I ask out of curiosity and a sort of amused incredulity: How can this be done? Are they going to deny, after 2,000 years of Christian religious and literary tradition, that limbo ever existed? How do they claim the authority to declare this? Is the proposal most likely to be dropped?